“A lie gets halfway around the world before truth has time to pull its boots on.”—commonly attributed to Mark Twain

“They used to say ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ but that isn’t true.  Whatever doesn’t kill you mutates, then comes back and tries again.”—Author unknown

Up until then, it had been a routine visit.  A check up for a new mother and her two-month-old baby.  Both were doing well.  Barely a year out of my residency training, I ticked off the do’s and don’ts for new babies, scheduled a follow-up appointment, then mentioned the immunizations the child would receive.

The new mother’s expression changed.  “I don’t want him to get any shots,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I responded, assuming she was concerned because the shots might be painful.  “It’s really quick and it’ll be over before he knows it.  A lot of babies don’t cry a peep.”

“It’s not that,” she said, with a bit of hesitation.  “I don’t want my faith to be weak.  I’m trusting God to take care of him.”

I was so stunned, my response leaped out of my mouth before I even had time to think.

Maybe a little explanation is in order.  My approach to vaccines and infectious diseases has been shaped not only by my medical training, but also my personal experiences.  In 1953, at age 18 months, our small-town family doctor examined me and found a rigid neck and a temperature of 105.  He dropped everything, and personally dashed me down to the Kansas University Medical Center in his own car, saving my life.  With a lot of luck—as well as ten days of antibiotic injections every six hours into my spinal fluid—I somehow managed to survive pneumococcal meningitis.

Three years later, my mother was the first person that same family doctor contacted when he received his initial shipment of polio vaccine.  She had me into his office in less than an hour.

Today, we have a vaccine for pneumococcal infections.  I think anyone who saw what I went through—a spinal tap every 6 hours—would want their child to get the shot. 

So it shouldn’t be surprising how I responded to that new mother who refused her child’s vaccines because she wanted to just trust God.

“Gee, lady,” I blurted out.  “You wouldn’t just leave your kid lying in a ditch somewhere and expect God to take care of him, would you?  Don’t you think God wants you to take a little responsibility for your child’s health, too?”

The young mother looked stunned, then mumbled something about going home and praying about it.  I never saw either of them again.

All of this was in 1982, long before the British medical journal The Lancet’s discredited article falsely linking vaccines to autism, long before a xeroxed letter that falsely claimed Proctor and Gamble was run by the Church of Satan had swept across the country and “gone viral” (before such a term was even invented), and long before the public availability of the internet.

Since then, it seems things have only gone downhill.

I won’t begin to touch on all of the falsehoods that have been spread by internet sites as well as an agenda-driven right-wing media.  I described some of these things in my last post “An Open Letter to The People of The United States of America.”  But suffice it to say these things have done more to destroy our credibility and damage America’s interests around the world than anything our adversaries could inflict.

So let’s not focus on phony election claims, environmental denial, or whether or not the world is secretly run by Lizard People.  There’ll be plenty of time for that in future posts.

Instead, let’s talk about something even more pressing—how anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-truth disinformation is killing Americans, and laying the groundwork for even more death when the next pandemic strikes.

But I’ll give you fair warning—to really understand all of this takes time.  You can’t just read a couple of inflammatory Facebook posts.   To truly confront this pandemic head-on means dropping our biases and looking at the big picture.  It means taking a realistic look at the disease, the vaccine, the issues of masks, mandates, and social distancing, as well as the wacko ideas that seem to arise daily.

Finally, it means taking a hard look at who we are as a nation, and how our response will impact our country’s future.

So if you’d rather just look at 30 second Facebook posts, and then scroll down to watch kitty-cat videos, no hard feelings, OK? But if you’re ready to bite the bullet and dive into the truth about all of this stuff, take a deep breath.  Here we go.

PART ONE:  THE VIRUS

First, the disease.  COVID-19 is a coronavirus (one of many) that attaches to the lining of the lungs and spreads rapidly.  It kills some people and not others.  We’re not completely sure why.

It spreads like wildfire, as quickly as varicella (chicken pox), the previous record holder for rapid transmission.  But it’s much more deadly and unpredictable.  One person can have symptoms no worse than a cold, give it to someone else, and they’ll be dead within a week.

No, most people who get it don’t die.  But plenty do—635,000 in this country, and 4.3 million around the world.  And everyone who’s looked critically at the data agrees that the actual numbers are higher.

Why? Because it’s fairly easy to track death rates from any cause (that is, a nation’s mortality rate) and calculate life expectancy.  And when deaths increase over the baseline, the life expectancy goes down.  In America, since the beginning of the COVID outbreak, deaths increased by over 800,000.  That’s 165,000 more than the official COVID count of 635,000.

And yes, not all of the deaths were directly due to COVID.  An increase in overdoses was a factor.  Almost certainly, some people died from heart attacks or other treatable conditions because they were afraid to go to the hospital for fear of contracting the virus.  But even in many of these cases, the virus played an indirect role.

What this means is that the average American now lives 1.5 fewer years than before the pandemic—the largest drop in life expectancy since World War II. 

Well, 1.5 fewer years if you’re white.  2.9 years fewer if you’re black.  And 3 years if you’re Hispanic.

There’s nothing magic about a virus.  It’s a cruelly efficient killer, a time bomb that just sits there doing nothing (because for all practical purposes it’s dead) until it contacts a living cell.  That’s when the zombie awakens.

The viral particle adheres to the cell, activates its surface proteins, then injects its genetic material (either a strand of DNA, or in the case of COVID, RNA) directly into the body of the cell.  The strand takes over, hijacking the cell’s machinery to make millions of copies of itself.  Eventually, the cell dies, the copies are released, and millions of other cells are targeted.  And if the virus emerges from cells in the lungs, the  particles will be exhaled into the surrounding air every time the infected person breathes.

That’s millions of cells, each producing millions of viral particles, being exhaled every second.  Do the math if you want, but you’d better use a calculator. 

Again, by itself the virus particle can do nothing.  It has to have a living cell to attach itself to.  It doesn’t have arms and legs and it can’t fly around on its own—it has to be carried by a tiny droplet or in an aerosol of vapor leaving the lungs of an infected person.

Ah, but we have immune systems, don’t we?  So if we survive COVID, as most people will, won’t we be immune to the disease in the future?

Partially and maybe.  Our immune system works well, but it’s not perfect.  Some patients will clearly become reinfected.  And the subsequent infections may even be worse. (There’s a well-known U.S. Senator, who also happens to be a physician, who seems totally clueless about this.  But we’ll get to him another time).

How does this happen?  Because viruses mutate.  And each mutation brings with it the chance for the virus to come back even stronger.

Each one of the millions of replications, in each of the millions of cells, in each of the millions of infected people, occurring millions of times each day, increases the possibility of a deadlier mutation.

How do you stop it?  Slowing the person-to-person transmission is the only way.

The only way.  No matter what you may hear, azithromycin, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, disinfectants, and powerful lights aint’ gonna cut it. 

All viruses can  mutate.  And this virus mutates in a way that is downright evil.

The Delta version spreads more rapidly than anything we’ve seen up to this point.  And with the way we’re currently headed with vaccine denial, we’re going to wind up with a lot more Greek letters before this is over.

And a lot more dead bodies.

Every cough, every sneeze, every breath from an infected person is one more chance for a mutant form to spread.  Morning in America may turn into Delta Dawn.

Let’s be blunt about our understanding.  There’s a lot about this virus we still don’t know.  But two years ago, we didn’t know this damned thing even existed.   We didn’t figure out small pox, polio, or cholera for decades.  Those who say “how come you scientists keep changing the story” about COVID don’t seem to realize we’re just now getting the story ourselves, as we try like hell to save lives while we track this beast down.

Yes, the virus can do a number on our lungs, not to mention our brains and nervous systems.  So-called Long COVID, where sufferers experience fatigue, confusion, imbalance and nerve dysfunction for months, maybe even years, is a real thing.  We don’t know why it happens to some people and not others.

And no, it’s not just old geezers like me.  Children are dying.  Marathon runners are dying.  People who swallow vitamins by the handful have died.  We don’t know why.

But besides the effect of the virus alone, another deadly complication is an uncontrolled response from our immune system.  When the body senses an infection, it starts a process that includes the release of cytokines, potent chemicals that attack the invader.  But sometimes the chemical response goes berserk, and the cytokines begin attacking every tissue in sight.  This psychotic frenzy can destroy lungs, the heart, and other organs.  For whatever reason, the immune system calls down an airstrike on itself.  It’s called cytokine storm.  We have no way of knowing who it will hit.

And guess what?  The virus really doesn’t care where it came from.  And if you get it, it won’t make any difference to you, either.  You’ll still have to fight it—maybe win, maybe lose.  The smart thing to do is prevent it.

A lot has been written about whether this virus jumped from the animal world to humans, as originally thought (like HIV and Ebola), or whether it escaped from a Chinese lab.  And if so, was it a virus that had been intentionally altered? 

We’ll probably never know.  The Chinese have never been ones to open themselves up to the world.  If it did escape a lab, it wouldn’t be the first time.  Anthrax has leaked from both American and Russian labs, and Great Britain experienced an escape of the small pox virus from one of its facilities.  What seems unlikely is that it was intentionally released.  Why release it in the middle of your own country? 

But could it have been an accident?  Who knows?

We’ve seen viruses crop up just about everywhere.  Marburg virus (similar in some ways to Ebola) was first seen in Germany.  COVID’s deadlier cousin, MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) was identified in central Asia, and despite what you may have learned in school, the “Spanish Flu” actually originated on a hog farm in Kansas (being from Missouri, I like to rub that in). 

The point is, a virus can come from anywhere.  All we can do is recognize that it’s here, that it’s dangerous, and that we need to be smart about how we deal with it. 

The more we politicize this process and ignore the science, the worse it will be for all of us, and the better for our competitors and adversaries—including the Chinese government.  Think about that for a moment.

We can be certain of one thing, though.  This will not be our last pandemic.  Future viral outbreaks will hit us, and they could well be much worse.  The only question is whether we have really learned anything from our current experience to guide us through the next round.

So what can we do about this COVID stuff in the meantime?     

In my next post, we’ll discuss all of that.  I’ll talk about vaccines, masks, mandates, and wackos.

OK, it may take more than one post.  See you then.